Freelancer acquires Canadian competitor Scriptlance!

Freelancer.com, the world’s largest outsourcing and crowdsourcing marketplace, today announced that it had acquired Scriptlance, Canada’s largest freelance marketplace and the fifth largest in the world. On the same day CEO Matt Barrie launched Freelancer in the same country – Busy Man!

Headquartered in Toronto, Scriptlance has over 360,000 enterprise and professional users. Incorporated in 2001 as R3N3 International Inc., by the then 20-year old Canadian technology entrepreneur René Trescases, Scriptlance was one of the early pioneers in the online outsourcing industry.

René quickly grew the site into one of the Internet’s largest and most popular freelance outsourcing portals. Over a decade later, Scriptlance has users from 244 countries, regions and territories globally. Over 600,000 projects have been posted to date, with over US$43 million paid out to freelancers by René and his team.

Scriptlance, with Alexa rank 3856, would rank 10th for global web traffic in TechVibe’s Canadian Startup Index, in the league of other internationally recognised Canadian brands such as Shopify and Freshbooks.

Scriptlance was also an early innovator in the now hot area of crowdfunding. One example of such was crowdfunding of equipment for a computer learning center for the poor in India, which tripled its target fundraising goal in 24 hours, using software that René wrote.

“We are tremendously excited to acquire Scriptlance, which is truly one of the great trailblazers and most widely recognised brands in the online outsourcing industry”, said Matt Barrie, Chief Executive of Freelancer.com, “Today we launch in Canada, and we couldn’t think of a better way to announce this than by buying one of Canada’s top technology websites.”

René Trescases, Chief Executive and Founder of Scriptlance, said “We’re thrilled to be joining forces with the global leader in the space. Selling to Freelancer made a lot of sense for us- they have the number one brand and the best scale and geographic reach of anyone in the industry”.

The acquisition undisputedly affirms Freelancer.com as the largest marketplace globally now at over 4 million users, which is over two and a half times the user base of its nearest competitors. Over 2.3 million projects have now been posted, also the most of any marketplace globally, through Freelancer.com in areas that initially started in Website Design, Graphic Design, Copywriting and SEO; but are as diverse as Astrophysics, Aerospace Engineering, Biotechnology, Manufacturing and Industrial Design.

Freelancer.com is also the global leader in web traffic for the industry, currently ranking at #359, according to Alexa. Freelancer enjoys a cult following in some countries, ranking #29 in Bangladesh and #38 in Pakistan, where freelancers rely upon the company to provide an income where technology jobs are sparse. Today, users from all over the world can hire and transact in 11 currencies.

Freelancer.com has aggressively rolled up the online outsourcing space since January 2009 when the company was started by Australian and BRW Entrepreneur of the Year Matt Barrie. The company’s acquisition of Scriptlance (Canada), adds to a list that includes GetAFreelancer (Sweden), LimeExchange (United States), Freelancer.co.uk (United Kingdom), Freelancer.de Booking Center (Germany), Freelancer.com.au (Australia) and Freelancer Hong Kong (China), together with the Freemarket.com virtual content marketplace (United States) and the Webmaster Talk (United States) forums.